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Attuned to fiddleheads

The tender greens are now popping up in Ontario, thanks to the fertile vision of East Coast entrepreneur.

Nick Secord and Oscar with fiddleheads. This is the first year for the crop, which Secord says will cover the ground like a lawn in a few years. (KEITH BEATY / TORONTO STAR)

(TANNIS TOOHEY / TORONTO STAR)

By Kim HoneyFood Editor

Wed., May 21, 2008

Port Colborne–Nick Secord was the laughingstock of town when the locals found out the city slicker had bought farmland at the edge of a bog.

"Somebody from the city bought the swamp," went the joke, according to Secord.

When he looked at the property, which was zoned for agricultural use even though it was unfarmable, the entrepreneur didn't see a marsh fit only for frogs. In his mind, he envisioned a sea of fiddleheads, the tightly curled tips of the ostrich fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris).

A wild delicacy savoured for their asparagus-like flavour, not to mention the first of the season's wild greens, fiddleheads are a signal to winter-weary Canadians that spring is really, truly on its way.

Secord's company, NorCliff Farms, is the largest grower, packer and distributor of wild fiddleheads in North America, shipping hand-picked greens from 1,000 acres of land Secord owns or manages in New Brunswick and Quebec to markets in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. On its best day ever, NorCliff moved 60,000 pounds.

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Over two years, Secord dug up 250,000 plants from his own land and transplanted them in Port Colborne, where he is building the province's first fiddlehead farm. In 2006 he planted about 100,000 ferns; last year he added another 150,000.

"There is no manual on how to run a fiddlehead farm," says Secord, who moved to Toronto 15 years ago and on to Port Colborne in 2003, after he met his wife, Nina DiLorenzo. "We literally learned how to do it."

He will let the plants, which reproduce sexually and through underground stems called rhizomes, propagate until next year, when he will begin harvesting Ontario's newest and most novel cash crop.

The New Brunswicker has been in the fiddlehead business since the '70s, when a friend who ran the local Dominion in his hometown of Campbellton asked him to find some for the store. In return, he would take Secord fly-fishing on the Restigouche River.

Secord found some people who knew where to find them, and made his first delivery.

"I didn't pick anything," he laughs. "I just wanted to go fishing."

Now when you see fiddleheads in supermarkets in Ontario, you have Secord to thank. He begins picking from his properties in southern Quebec first, usually around the last week of April and first of May, which is where the fiddleheads in Loblaws and Fortinos come from. The harvesting moves east through the weeks and wraps up in northern Gaspé about mid-June.

The Ontario farm will extend that six-week season by about two weeks, Secord figures, since they will be the first to pop up given their southern location. He expects to get about 5,000 pounds per acre from the Ontario property, though only about five acres will be in production next year.

Once Secord planted the ferns, there wasn't a whole lot to do. He thinned the stands of softwood maple and poplar in the forest, home to wild turkeys, deer and coyotes.

The biggest hurdle was how to get water to the fiddleheads, which love riverbanks. On the east side of the property, he uses hoses hooked up to a man-made pond. But on the west side, he's built a levee system, fed by another man-made pond, this one stocked with rainbow trout.

"They like the water, but they don't want to sit in the water," he explains.

It is late April when Secord and DiLorenzo show off the property, which includes a brand-new, 4,000-square-foot house with black onyx sinks, a bake oven built into the floor-to-ceiling fireplace and a dumb waiter to carry firewood from the main floor to the basement.

There are many vantage points to admire the forest where last years' spore pods are still visible, including a lookout off the driveway with an inviting circle of chairs.

"The funny part is, I haven't sat in any of these places," says Secord, a bundle of energy who is just putting the finishing touches on a guest apartment for visiting chefs.

He won't reveal his age, but looks pleased when he's pegged at 50 or 55. He plans to live to 100 or even 120, and thinks fiddleheads are going to help get him there.

He points to the work of Nova Scotia plant physiologist John DeLong, whose research shows fiddleheads are low in sodium, high in omega-3 fatty acids, and are thought to have as many, if not more, antioxidants than blueberries.

DeLong, a research scientist at the Atlantic Food and Horticulture Research Centre in Kentville, has a four-year grant from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada to study the nutritional value of fiddleheads.

At a conference in Charlottetown this week he will reveal the ostrich fern's unique profile, which is surprisingly high in alpha lineolic acid, or ALA, an essential fatty acid we can get only from food. It also has a small amount of EPA or eicosapentaenoic, which is common in fish but rare in plants.

"It could be close to purslane, which is the golden standard. It has the highest amount of omega-3s in leafy green tissue," says DeLong, referring to a wild plant many consider a weed but others eat as a salad green.

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